Abstract
Previous research has shown that pre-aspiration can be a phonemic and a variable linguistic feature susceptible to linguistic and extra-linguistic influences. In the case of Welsh, previous exploratory work has found the presence of pre-aspiration but the phonetic and phonological properties of this feature and its sociophonetic patterning in the language are not known. This paper is based on a recent study (Morris & Hejná, forthcoming) and presents analyses of the variety of Welsh spoken in Bethesda (Gwynedd). It reports the frequency of occurrence of pre-aspiration, its duration, and noisiness. As well as describing pre-aspiration, it attempts to ascertain the extent to which this feature is influenced by linguistic and extra-linguistic factors.

Wordlist data were analysed from 16 Welsh–English bilinguals from Bethesda (Gwynedd, north Wales). Speakers were aged between 16 and 18 years old and the sample was stratified by speaker sex and home language (either Welsh or English). The results indicate that pre-aspiration is frequent in both fortis and lenis plosives (the latter of which are typically devoiced in Welsh). In addition to a number of linguistic influences on its production, both speaker sex and home language were found to be significant predictors of variation for some measures.

The results are discussed with reference to previous studies of pre-aspiration in other languages and work on phonetic variation in Welsh–English bilingual speech. Specifically, we comment on the extent to which pre-aspiration patterns identically across languages and how further work on different varieties of Welsh (and indeed Welsh Englishes) will provide a more detailed overiew of the sociophoentics of pre-aspiration in Welsh.

WA Distinguished Professors' Lectures Series features internationally renowned scholars visiting the Faculty of English to share their research and professional expertise with WA faculty and students. The Faculty of English welcomes everyone to a lecture Revisiting culture and language: Crossing borders and national identity by Prof. Adrian Holliday from Canterbury Christ Church University. The lecture will take place on January 31, 2019, at 6:30 p.m. in room 109A, Collegium Novum.

Revisiting culture and language:
Crossing borders and national identity
by

Professor Adrian Holliday

Thursday, January 31, 6:30 p.m.
109A Collegium Novum

‘I already have a culture. I don’t need yours.’ ‘We are not who you think we are.’ ‘English is owned by everyone.’ The first was said by an ‘international student’ studying in Britain, the second by a student of English who was accused of not being critical. The third is what many scholars tell us about English and culture. Scholars also tell us that we can no longer speak of solid national cultures that make us essentially different to each other and that ‘native speaker’ is a neo-racist concept. In an academic climate where many established concepts are being challenged, I shall consider the important question of on what basis we can talk of cultural and linguistic identity. I shall look at this question within the dynamic context of small culture formation on the go.

Adrian Holliday is Professor of Applied Linguistics & Intercultural Education at Canterbury Christ Church University, where he supervises doctoral research in the critical sociology of language and intercultural education. His publications deal with the cultural politics of international English language education, the Western ideologies which inhibit our understanding of non-Western cultural realities, the cultural politics of so-labelled ’native-’ vs. ‘non-native speaker’ teachers, and qualitative research methodology. His is also co-director of the PhD in Education. He spent the early part of his career as a teacher and then curriculum advisor in Iran, Syria and Egypt, and was Head of The Graduate School at CCCU between 2003 and 2018. His most recent book is Understanding intercultural communication: negotiating a grammar of culture, 2nd edition, Routledge, and forthcoming is Decentering narratives of culture: negotiating blocks and threads, with Sara Amadasi, Routledge. His website is at adrianholliday.com.

Dear Students!
Please arrive at least 15 minutes before the test and form two groups in front of the room as you will be divided into two groups according to your surnames (as listed alphabetically in USOS).
Group 1: Students with surnames from A to Ł and Group 2: Students with surnames from M to Z.

Dear Students!
Semester Test in History of English Literature before 1900 (lectures) for 1 BA Academic Groups will take place on February 1st, room XVII Collegium Minus, 13:00-15:00 and a Retake Test on February 8th, room C1 Collegium Novum, 14:00-15:30.

WA Friday Lunch Talks are monthly meetings with presentations of current research results or research in progress by WA faculty, staff, or PhD students. Each talk is of 30 minutes (+ 10 minutes for discussion).

One of the fundamental assumptions of emotion research is that emotion terms carry implicit affective and emotional meaning. In this study we looked for correlations between explicit and implicit evaluations of affect and basic emotion categorizations of happiness and sadness in male and female voices. Raters evaluated valence, categorized the valence in the voices (explicit tasks), or engaged in free naming of the emotion. The responses in the free naming task were tagged for the implicit valence and basic emotion categories they carried. We found a strong correlation between the implicit and explicit categorizations by basic emotions in female voices expressing happiness and male voices expressing sadness. The results provide further support for the role of gender stereotyping as an important factor in emotion processing. The results are discussed with reference to the Behavioral Ecology View of Emotions. The implications of the results for the field of psycholinguistic research on emotions are discussed. The development of a new set of psycholinguistic tools for the study of emotions through language within the Basic Emotions Catalogue project is also briefly presented.
This material was originally presented during the 59th Psychonomics Meeting in New Orleans, LA, USA (15-18th November 2018) in the form of a poster. Co-author: Jeanette Altarriba, PhD (University at Albany – SUNY).

Recent neurophysiological evidence suggests that novel metaphor comprehension provides a window on creative cognition (e.g. Beaty et al., 2017; Rataj et al. 2017; Rutter et al. 2012). We built on these findings and studied whether creative thinking is modulated by prior knowledge. We collected electrophysiological responses to literal, nonsense, and novel metaphorical sentences that were either referring to engineering knowledge (The wind tickled the turbine) or general knowledge (The earthquake inhaled the city) testing engineering and non-engineering students. Following Rutter et al. (2012), sentences differed in verb only and were classified in prior norming studies (n = 65) as highly unusual and highly appropriate (novel metaphors), low unusual and highly appropriate (literal sentences), and highly unusual and low appropriate (nonsense sentences).
In the EEG experiment, participants read sentences and made judgments about their unusualness and appropriateness. Ongoing EEG was time-locked to the verb and to the final word to assess the early and late stages of sentence comprehension. The results reveal an increased N400 to novel metaphors and nonsense sentences relative to literal sentences at the early processing stage for both participant groups. At the later stage, the N400 is maximal for nonsense sentences, followed by novel metaphors and then literal sentences. Notably, however, engineering novel metaphors lead to a decreased N400 compared to non-engineering novel metaphors in engineering students only, suggesting that prior knowledge affects novel metaphor comprehension. The findings will be interpreted within the framework of figurative language and creative cognition.

As part of the Uniwersytet Jutra project, the University has provided free training courses to help you improve and modernize your online didactic and research skills. Some courses are offered in English.

*** This post does NOT concern those who have already passed the course - whether in 2018/19 or 2017/18 ***

The "Copyright protection and citing sources" course, scheduled for the winter term in your 1BA study programme, is closing on 21 February 2019. If you have not passed it yet, and you would like to pass, please note that the very last "Extended session retake" quiz option will be open 18-21 February, 2019, BUT you must do all the required readings first to be able to enter it.

If you have not even joined the Moodle course yet, you must do so by February 15th, so you have the time to read all the materials first.

*** This post does NOT concern those who have already passed the e-course - whether in 2018/19 or 2017/18. Those who took it before 2017, please get in touch ***

Dear Students,

The "English Academic Writing for BA Students (e-course) (2018/19)" – obligatory for 3BA students and some 1MA students - is closing on 24 February, 2019.

If you have not passed the course yet (i.e. your course grade does not indicate 60% or more), you can work on the readings to score more points. If you need to re-take any of the closed quizzes, get in touch personally and tell me which quiz(zes) you want to re-do.

If you never entered the e-course, extended enrolment is possible until 15 Feb 2019 - ONLY after contacting me with your year and group information.

The Department of the History of English has the pleasure to announce that the next meeting of the HELL Reading Club this academic year will take place on Tuesday February the 26th at 4.45p.m, in Room C Collegium Martineum.

The paper to be discussed:

Richard Coates - Celtic whispers: Revisiting the problems of the relation between Brittonic and Old English (Namenkundliche Informationen (2017) 109/110: 147-173)

The Department of the History of English has the pleasure to announce that the next meeting of the Fun with Old English study group this academic year will take place on Tuesday, February the 26th, at 5:45 p.m. in Room C Collegium Martineum.

Canadian Literature in Perspective Reading Group (CLiP) warmly invites everybody interested in Canadian literature to the next meeting of CLiP. This time we will discuss a famous book by Thomas King Green Grass, Running Water. The meeting will take place in Collegium Novum, room 117A on Tuesday, February 26, 6.30 p.m. To get access to the text contact us on Facebook or email the moderator: Michał Kapis M.A. at mkapis@wa.amu.edu.pl

WA Distinguished Professors' Lectures Series features internationally renowned scholars visiting the Faculty of English to share their research and professional expertise with WA faculty and students. The Faculty of English welcomes everyone to a lecture Are multilinguals the better academic EFL users? Evidence from a questionnaire study measuring self-assessed proficiencies by Prof. Dr. Peter Siemund from the University of Hamburg. The lecture will take place on February 27 (Wednesday), 2019, at 6:30 p.m. in room 109A, Collegium Novum.

Are multilinguals the better academic EFL users?
Evidence from a questionnaire study measuring self-assessed proficiencies
by

The question of putative multilingual advantages is still being hotly debated. Following some initial euphoria regarding increased executive control, cognitive reserve, cognitive development, metalinguistic awareness, and language learning abilities, the field is currently characterized by a wave of critical sobering, as key findings fail to be replicated. I here offer a summary of the current controversy followed by a discussion of new evidence drawn from a questionnaire study amongst 1252 students and 290 instructors at the University of Hamburg. This study measures self-assessed proficiencies in English amongst subjects who regularly use English as a Lingua Franca in the context of tertiary education. I compare self-assessed English proficiencies between monolingually and multilingually raised ELF users in five CEFR domains, namely listening and reading comprehension, spoken interaction, as well as spoken and written production. The results attest slightly higher scores for multilingually raised ELF users, of statistical significance in some domains, which I interpret in terms of a multilingual advantage. However, I wish to be cautious about generalizing these findings, as they need to be substantiated by tests that objectively measure proficiencies.

Peter Siemundhas been Professor of English Linguistics at the University of Hamburg since 2001. He pursues a cross-linguistic typological approach in his work on reflexivity and self-intensifiers, pronominal gender, interrogative constructions, speech acts and clause types, argument structure, tense and aspect, varieties of English, language contact, and multilingual development. His many publications include, as author, Pronominal Gender in English: A Study of English Varieties from a Cross-Linguistic Perspective (Routledge, 2008), Varieties of English: A Typological Approach (CUP 2013), and Speech Acts and Clause Types: English in a Cross-Linguistic Context (OUP 2018), and, as editor, Linguistic Universals and Language Variation (Mouton de Gruyter 2011) and Foreign Language Education in Multilingual Classrooms (with Andreas Bonnet; John Benjamins 2018).